[Part VI] Who's That Tweeting? Anonymous Minion Control

In Part I, iPhone as SPIME: Citizen As Sensor, I gave some background on the concept of the "spime", a technical concept for a device that documents its own position and surroundings in space and time. I also pointed out that if there is already such a thing as a spime, most people refer to it as a "cellphone" and they probably don't really know a whole lot about how it works, or what it can do, either for them... or to them.

In [Part II] Rewards v. Risks: Cellphone As Leash I digressed a bit into the history of a strange phenomenon of the modern age: people that e-mail other people to try to make them into dupes, lackeys, and minions. The odd thing is that almost nobody would fall for this on a telephone, and most people probably won't fall for it in e-mail, not anymore. But would they fall for it as SMS texts on their cellphone? I also provide some links to technology enabling "crowdsourcing" via the internet and SMS "texting".

In [Part III] Your House is Talking About You Behind Your Back, I posted some links about the House That Tweets, and a few cautions about how you might not want to, not just yet, set up your 21st-Century Home to be controlled by SMS, or "simple messaging service", also known as "tweeting".

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SMS Spoofing has a sordid history that goes back almost to the very first publication of the technological standard. There are even commercial services that encourage people to engage in "anonymous mobile phone texting for fun".

Vernor Vinge, a famous computer scientist and science-fiction author was giving a speech at a conference.

Someone in the media asked something to the effect of "So, Professor Vinge, are you actually suggesting that some day the computers will all take over and turn us all into living robots?"

And the professor reaches back to his belt, pulls out his pager, checks the message, and says something like, "I've got to cut this short, gotta swing by the store and buy dog food. Next question?"

It remains arguable as to whether or not this was a humorous way of answering the question, or a way of answering the question that seemed funny at the time, but as time passes and more consideration is given, should cause the reader a level of concern that should perhaps be rather grave.

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As much as I loathe cellphones, even more do I despise alphanumeric pagers.

Most of these use a format comparable to SMS, with a limited line length, and mostly I used them because I was working in network administration and was occasionally on-call. That meant that whenever the damned thing went off, I had to go where it told me, mail who it told me, or call who it told me to call.

That this happened very infrequently, and that only once did it actually wake me up, does nothing to decrease my loathing of the damned things.

Why? -the Astute Reader may well ask.

I loathed the damned thing so much because it wasn't a human being that sent me the wake-up call. It was "QPage".

QuickPage (or "QPage" at the time) was a spiffy little program that converted e-mail and sent it via SNPP ("Simple Network Paging Protocol").

If one of the servers that monitored the network detected certain conditions -- bad ones -- it would send a mail to a certain e-mail address. Anything that hit that address went straight to QPage, which picked up a modem and dialed a pager number, and sent the text in the contents of the e-mail.

All I have to say about that is this: I'm very glad indeed that I wasn't wearing a pager anymore when the spammers discovered the QPage monitoring emergency address and started deluging it with ads for Make More Penis Fast with Tax Free Nigerian Rolex.

But I digress.

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In a previous post, we mentioned a Bruce Sterling novel, "Distraction", and mentioned a plot element from it which -- more or less -- has been observed in Real Life.

I also do not like e-mail lists, as a rule, unless all of the traffic is archived and available for examination by concerned parties. For example, when I was running the Aspen Hill area's "community-policing" mailing list, I preserved all of the traffic and it was accessible to any subscriber.

Somehow, I have managed to get on a couple of fairly odd lists. One is the so-called "the die-off" list. This brings me a fair amount of traffic. Some of it is interesting. Some of it is even well-researched and/or intelligently written. Yet I did not subscribe to it intentionally, and I have not been able to get unsubscribed.

How the heck did this happen to me?

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I run the search-engine that crawls the website of the Robert E Peary "Midnight Sun" alumni. I've been doing this since Bob Lau and I met up at the 1996 20-year-reunion, right when the InterNet was just going public.

The original "Harvest" software has been adapted to many uses, including things like Squid Web Cache. It's also, sadly, been adapted by spammers, who used it to crawl UseNet and the World Wide Web for e-mail addresses.

In a fairly basic form, this originally wasn't too bad. At first, they started trying to market things like computer products to people posting in the newsgroups about computers, or perhaps trying to sell medical equipment to the people posting in the medical science newsgroups. Then, of course, it all got out of hand.

Yet some people do in fact use it more or less in that original not-too-objectionable mode... but the purposes can be even more objectionable than runaway spamming.

Some people will crawl a website or a dozen websites -- given enough bandwidth and drive capacity you could conceivably crawl a sizable part of the server-based internet -- that are websites (or UseNet newsgroups) with specific themes or interests.

I once crawled every Gothic themed newsgroup and webserver I could find, thinking to make a few dollars helping Goths and other counterculture types find neat jewelry and accessories, and perhaps even some Nice Boots now and then.

And one day, while playing around, I discovered that I could enter a keyword and the "@" sign, and get a list of every e-mail address associated with that keyword.

I had at my fingertips a very powerful tool for finding the e-mail addresses of people with specific interests. I still do have that. Google could do that, but Google always mungs the e-mail addresses to forestall spammers. Thank you Google!

I am a very civic-minded person, one of the types that always chants the mantra, "don't be Evil".

But what could I do if evil was what I had in mind?

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Let's say that I just hate convicted sex offenders.

Let's say that I google for people discussing how much they, too, hate convicted sex offenders.

Let's say that I send my web-crawler out and grab every last one of their e-mail addresses.

And let's say that I use my mailing-list (listserv) software to spam them seeking to get them to join my new anti-sex-offender crusade.

And let's say that as part of the ongoing conversation that develops, I mention that it's just sort of pointless to be typing on a computer at home or in the coffee shop, while those horrible sex offenders are out on the streets. Why not go mobile?

And once I've got their SMS address/number, I sort out the ones that are sane and calm enough to figure out that they're being played, from those who will get all hot under the collar, so to speak, and fly off the handle, again so to speak... and then I drop all contact with the ones who are calm and sane.

Then I harvest the most emotional and incitatory language from the mails or postings of some of them, and send it to some of the others. I generate no content at all, just provide routing... and I do it all through an SMS anonymizer.

Once they're all in a lather and not thinking too clearly and are itching for some action, then I spam them with a target list...

And I may now congratulate myself as being the Lord Master of Minion Control.

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I should point out at this point that in the State of Maryland, there are no laws at all that prohibit this.

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More to come?

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